Recording - September 2012 - 26

and expensive. A lot of artists may not have had the luxury of being a professional touring musician who’s had the time and resources to hone their craft. Or, maybe they’ve never had an honest outside ear of a producer to help make better what they are already doing. It’s a business and it comes down to cost. It’s expensive to let a band tour and let them find themselves and sit with a band in the studio for 3–6 months working on music while not necessarily keeping everything to make a proper record. Can you give us some specifics? It starts with finding something that I fall in love with on an artistic level, which

we’re both excited about on a song level, like strong melodies or great lyrics; maybe it’s a great chorus that needs to be finished. Once we have narrowed down a song selection, we start the recording process with no real end game in mind. I want to start seeing how the songs feel recorded and where the weak spots are. What happens to the vocal between preproduction and tracking session? I am a big believer in letting the artist be who they are. I never try to coach a vocal performance to a point where they aren’t singing from the heart. The best vocal performances come from comfortable, happy singers. It’s counter productive to coach a vocal down to the line or syllable. I love warts and great unexpected mistakes—those are performances. I prefer to trust in their instincts; if you’re having a hard time getting a vocal performance,

present, and this mic only accentuates it. Other times, especially with female singers, we’ll get too much in the 10K region and above, and need a mic with less top-end accentuation. Having said this, I am not the type of producer that will hem and haw all afternoon about what mic to use. Generally, if we try it out and it feels good we’ll keep moving. If we have a very specific idea for a sound in mind, we’ll certainly play with mics, preamps, compressors and eqs. Otherwise, we throw up some classic gear and 90% of the time it sounds amazing. I’ll only ever stop and really focus in on a mic if there’s an obvious issue with the combination of mic and singer. What can you share specifically about your mic choices and signal chain for the Jesse Thomas album? With my first signing, Jesse Thomas

generally means a voice that’s unmistakable and compelling. A very close second is an artist with the innate ability to write great songs, and have something to say. There has to be an intangible quality that I can’t put my finger on. Lastly, the artists have to have heart and be willing to work harder than they ever have! Finding someone with all of this is so incredibly rare, in my experience. As with all art, what qualifies as great is subjective, but I have to rely on my own ears and trust that what I find compelling, others will too. These artists range from someone who lives in their car and works at a grocery store (true story!) to someone who is already selling out venues and is on major tours. What happens next? Assuming they want to join the Red Parade label family, I like hearing the first songs they ever wrote. This helps figure out who they are by seeing where they’ve come from. We then find the stuff that
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it’s time to put it away for the day and try again later. Don’t over-think it and get frustrated; go out to dinner, have a beer, tell some jokes, and then come back to the studio with a different attitude and a bit more refreshed. It almost always works. A glass of whisky or red wine does wonders for an uptight singer! How do you choose vocal mics for the artists you produce? I will generally start with a tried-and-true mic. I’ll also set up four or five other mics to get some context for the song and their voice. If my go-to mic is a U87, I’ll also set up an M149, my Bock 195, an SM7, my new sE VR2 ribbons, an old Russian Lomo mic that I love, and maybe a Shure Green Bullet for fun. There are never any rules. Most of the time my instincts will be right with the “goto” mic, but there are definitely times when that mic doesn’t agree with the person’s voice, for whatever reason. Sometimes it’s the 2K region that’s just too

(www.iamjessethomas.com), I started off using mostly condenser mics on her acoustic guitar and her vocal. Most of the time this works great, which is why I just set them up out of routine. But listening back we both felt that it made her music feel too polished, so, on a gut level, it just felt wrong. Her voice is gritty—too gravelly and airy for a condenser, and it just made the vocal sound harsh. So we pulled that mic down and put some other options up, mostly dynamic and ribbon microphones. We ended up using a Shure SM57 on her acoustic and most other instruments, and for her vocal I chose a Shure SM7. It sounded magical on her and we knew it the second we heard it. Using mostly dynamic mics gave the record a raw tone that we both loved. The SM7 went through a Great River NV2, with lots of gain, into an 1176 compressor, and to my Pultec EQ. The Young Romans album has a lot of synthetic sounds; how did you choose sounds that blended so well with the acoustic parts?

http://www.iamjessethomas.com

Recording - September 2012

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